


what dreams may come

by panda_shi, sub_textual



Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Parallel Universes, literary, post-fourth war canon, shifting narrators
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-07
Updated: 2012-06-07
Packaged: 2017-11-07 04:56:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/427115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panda_shi/pseuds/panda_shi, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sub_textual/pseuds/sub_textual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if parallel worlds and lives collided? Kakashi and Iruka find each other once more through dreams. Set in post-fourth war canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally developed from an RP with panda_shi. One day we'll finish it. One day.

**what dreams may come**

_To sleep, perchance to dream._

**\----------------------------------------------------------------------  
Written by sub_textual and panda_shi**

\----------------------------------------------------------------------

  
He's not sure how it begins, only how it ends.   
  
They sit on a stretch of white sand, hand in hand, watching waves lap against the shore. It is summer, and the sky stretches wide and endless above. The blue seems to go on forever, and Kakashi almost thinks for a moment that maybe it does. That this moment might last as long as the sky is high, and if he closes his eyes he might be able to pretend that it will. Even if nothing lasts forever, because it never can. Not the endlessness of the sky, or the calmness of the sea, or this moment where he sits hand in hand with a man whose face is blotted out by the brightness of the sun. The glow illuminates him, cuts a silhouette out of him in light.   
  
"The tide is rising," he says, and Kakashi thinks he can picture a smile fading in those words.   
  
In the distance, a sandcastle with intricate turrets and towers crumbles against the rising sea.   
  
The last thing Kakashi sees, before he wakes up, is what looks and feels like love in warm brown eyes.   
  
  


*

  
How he knows the name to this feeling, Kakashi isn't sure. He wakes up with it, this warm thing in his chest that certainly doesn't belong. Sometimes it lingers, waits for him to address it, to notice its presence when his mind comes to rest and he isn't trying so hard to forget it, like one would a bad dream. It becomes muted, eventually fades as the day progresses, only to re-emerge at night again when he lies down and closes his eyes and dreams.  
  
They're always bright and vivid and filled with so much feeling and life, that sometimes Kakashi's convinced they're not just dreams.  
  
Kakashi's dreams are shaped by loss. Of comrades left behind and buried in the past. The earth turns into a river of blood under his feet. The blood of shinobi, the blood of friends. The blood of a boy who once squared his shoulders and declared he'd bring down this broken system one day. He would change the world, redefine it somehow.  _(But how do you change anything when you're buried underneath a rock?) _ And there in the distance is an eight year old boy, with his hands covered in his father's blood and lightning against the sky. But he's just another one of many, because when this world you live in is at war, and the war never seems to end, what happens is the death of childhoods. Of children who cease to be children. They carry around what remains of their parents in their hands, on their skin. In a shell-shocked gaze that stops a boy in the middle of a street just before his small body explodes.  
  
 _(It's never supposed to be this way, but it always is.)_  
  
This is war: the mind at rest, at sleep, but the war keeps going. People keep dying -- or rather, they can't seem to stop dying, when the shutter-flick of your mind keeps revisiting what you don't want to see. What you wish you could forget. Bury the way bodies are buried, so deep that all you see is earth and not the way that they died. But it's the how that gets you every time, and so the war goes on, even long after it's been won. The war goes on, and you realize that peace is just another word for what they call victory.  
  
Someone once said victory is only an illusion of philosophers and fools.  
  
Kakashi would agree, because victory is always empty. Victory is never really victory, not when the war inside can never end.  
  
It's strange, then. Utterly alien, for Kakashi to be dreaming of sandcastles and watching a sea at rest. Of his hand in another's, reading something like love in warm brown eyes, when this life of his has only been defined by one thing, and that thing has been what has stopped him for thirty years from ever knowing what he saw in that dream. From that feeling he wakes up with at dawn, which tells him it's okay to close his eyes again and stay a little while longer in bed. Don't go yet, I'll miss you if you get up too soon.  
  
Okay, he concedes. Maybe just a little longer.  
  


*

  
The war ended months ago, leaving Konoha gasping for breath.   
  
Life hasn't quite returned to what it used to be, and maybe it never can. But they all try in their own way to move on, to rebuild and keep on living their lives. Find what bits of happiness they can in a village destroyed and rebuilt so many times, nothing original remains. Construction goes on everywhere, the ringing of hammers and of men's voices calling to one another across the way. And if it wasn't for the scars that still mark the land, some might not have even known there was ever a war at all.   
  
Laughter has returned to the village, to the narrow alleys between buildings where children chase one another as they play. They pass by Kakashi, who carries a brightly colored book propped open with one hand, a thumb parting the pages.   
  
He is three hours late when he shows up to the mission building to collect his daily duties in the reconstruction effort. And maybe it's the fact that he's not paying attention to where he's going, or that his mind keeps sliding back to that stretch of beach and the feeling of his hand in another's, but Kakashi finds himself accidentally slamming right into another person as he turns the corner.   
  
"Ah, excuse--" He begins, the apology abruptly cutting off when his gaze meets a pair of warm brown eyes.   
  


*

  
Just as quick as the scowl melts away from a face that is tinted red from running back and forth. It is that time of the day where things are at their busiest peak and Iruka does more than he's supposed to. Overseeing foundation works, taking care of a schooling system they are trying to rebuild, sheltering the unsheltered, making sure there is adequate resources, making sure that the network within Konoha is running. Ten things at once and so little time.  
  
It's so easy to get distracted; like now. With how Iruka openly stares at a masked face he cannot see. And hasn't seen in a while.    
  
"Ah, no no …"  
  
It is strange feeling of displacement that goes through Iruka's spine, settles in his stomach like a warm breeze brushing against the leaves of a sycamore tree. It is what he dreams of, the feeling of his back against the tree and the weight of a head on his lap, coarse hair between his fingers, watching a pair of lips go slack in a lose smile. It is a picture of comfort, contentment, love; it sticks out like a beacon amongst dreams that had been filled with nothing but funeral pyres; the memory of a comrade's dying weight on his shoulder when he had been salvaging their troops during the war; and the memory of how blades had cut through skin or how there hadn't been time to mourn, or how he had been forced to grow, even at this age and time, and bear the title of Jounin and lead teams and be amongst teams, only to end up as one of the few to survive.  
  
Even now, there is no time to mourn for the loss.  
  
Because now, they're so busy picking up pieces.  
  
(And you're not sure if you've got yours all intact.)  
  
"It's my fault! I wasn't paying better attention!"  
  
The smile makes his face lift up, replaces the brief search, the brief confusion. Embarrassment creeps in, taints his cheekbones red and makes a hand reach up rub the edge of a scar that cuts across the bridge of his nose. Realization that he shouldn't have been staring in the first place - _manners! Where are your manners?_ \- just because seeing Hatake Kakashi pause, seeing him watch him this way, it's not out of place.  
  
Sometimes you think another person is dead, ashes amongst sand and homes that have been burnt down. Sometimes, when you see them down the hall, see that they had survived the war … sometimes you feel weak around the knees and relief spreads in your chest like it's been deprived of air for a long time. Sometimes, it's just good to see people again.  
  
(Right?)  
  
Iruka watches as the look that makes him feel displaced is quickly replaced by a cheerful look, eye crinkling upwards into an arc of a smile. Genuine, his mind supplies. Iruka knows it's genuine because he's learned to read people better, look beneath masks whether it is made of cloth, porcelain or smiles.  
  
War can force a child to grow up so fast. It can also force a grown man to age just as quickly.  
  
"Well, if you insist." Kakashi says all too lightly, maybe even a touch cheerful.  
  
Iruka's smile falls and his brow twitches, eyes narrowing in harmless annoyance because Iruka had managed to catch the tail end of what would have been an apology.  
  
"You weren't paying attention either." Iruka's voice is flat, unamused but not unkind. A friendly reprimand.  
  
Kakashi's visible eye softens around the corners, as a gloved hand moves to rest on Iruka's shoulder. A pat, comrade to comrade, which is quickly followed by a light,  "Mmm, but I wasn't the one who admitted it~"  
  
Iruka says nothing after that, and instead looks over his shoulder as Kakashi easily side steps him and continues his path down the corridor. Iruka doesn't go immediately; he returns the stare he had been given earlier on a back that turned to him until it disappears behind a door. Iruka tries to understand, a heavy weight resting between his eyebrows as he continues to study the person who doesn't look back at him. Tired, lined with tension, shoulders slumped, heavy with loss, dragging footsteps, soles of sandaled feet a weighty brush against wooden floor boards.  
  
 _Kakashi-san is tired_ , Iruka thinks.  
  
But it isn't the fatigue that makes Iruka thinks of the man, but the way a gray eye had flickered briefly, like a fire that had been infused with too much air to burn and too much fuel to combust, before it goes out completely, muted once more by environment. Those moments, when a man's eye flashes so brightly, Iruka knows it to be hope. How many times has he knelt before men who coughed up rivers of crimson, with limbs missing and marrow and flesh sticking out from burns and shreds and of flesh? How many times has he reassured them when they asked, _did we get them? _ or _did we take the fort down_? or _is that enough?_  
  
How many times has Iruka said, _yes, you did good?_  
  
Or, _yes, we made it. We'll be fine._  
  
The recognition of victory, or achievement, Iruka is reminded of those men. Those men who picture something in their minds that Iruka will never know, will never understand -- except he does.  
  
War forces one to age. War makes people see things.  
  
One shouldn't compare the living to that of men in their last moments. Iruka blames the war for that, and continues on his way.  
  


*

  
That night, Iruka dreams.  
  
There is a house, hidden from the main path amongst trees and under a blue sky. Clay roof tiles, gray concrete wall fencing, cobblestones, polished wood and tatami. A fire burns in the irori and cool mist curls around the surface of a koi pond where gold fins splash under its surface. Winter sleeps upon the ground of this home, quiet and misty gray like how it curls upon the vista of green grass and the base of a sycamore tree, around his own breath.  
  
And  _his_.  
  
Lips, he realizes, that are once more slacking in a lazy smile. Iruka is under that tree,  his head on his lap. There is a scar cutting down one eye, and under silver lashes, a pair of mismatched eyes. Iruka's hand is threading through silver strands, watching this face that he wishes nothing more but to continue waking up to.  
  
"You make me happy." Iruka says.  
  
The smile that comes then, upon a mouth that makes a face that is always covered look ten times younger, makes eyes soften around the edges and the lines of worry and weight of reason and duty disappear. It is a smile that speaks louder than words because in it, Iruka can hear and see the answer clearly.  
  
"Mmm…"  
  
When Iruka wakes, he finds that he is already late.  
  


*

  
There is a pattern to how one's day starts and how it ends. Iruka's last working hour almost always leaves him yawning behind a hand and looking a little too ruffled and exhausted. His bed is something he looks forward to, his dreams even more so when it is all about comfort and contentment he hasn't known, save for what his mind chooses to paint.  
  
It is not different today.  
  
Even at this hour, Konoha is still busy. Iruka is yawning behind a hand, sleepy tears pushing to the corner of his eyes when his shoulder bumps against someone. It is the sound of rustling paper and the sound of muted thumps that makes Iruka react quickly and catch the last orange that rolls off the top of a paper bag. He is already bending and picking the last four from the ground, mouth moving without thinking.  
  
"Ah, please forgive me! I'm so… " He starts off, the apology muting to a stunned silence and a handful of oranges.  
  
"Clumsy?" Kakashi supplies, as he bends down with his bag of groceries, reaching for another orange, the corner of his eye slightly crinkled with mild amusement.  
  
"Sleepy," Iruka corrects, his eyes drawing down slightly in mild exasperation as he places the oranges back in Kakashi's bag. But his eyes linger on Kakashi's face curiously, a kind of look Kakashi recognizes as one that wants to penetrate. See what it is that he hides under his mask. It lingers a moment too long, and then Iruka flushes, red blotting high on his cheeks as it works its way down his neck. "I'm sorry, either way..." He sounds as embarrassed as he looks, eyes cast away from Kakashi, down towards the grocery bag he holds in his hands. There's a slight smile at his lips, awkward and nervous.  
  
Kakashi studies him for a moment, and then makes a bit of a good natured hum low in the back of his throat, his eyes still steady on Iruka's face. "A~aa... is this going to become a daily occurrence, Iruka-san?" He asks, his voice lilting with the question, which receives a sudden glance from Iruka, before the younger man looks back down, the nervousness easing out of his smile and softening into something that seems all too familiar but shouldn't be.  
  
"If it is, then fate has a funny sense of humor," Iruka says, tilting his head a little in the way that he does when he feels slightly out of place. _(How Kakashi knows this, he's not sure.)_  
  
"Fate?" Kakashi raises an eyebrow slightly. "You believe in that?"  
  
Fate is the kind of thing written in books. In the stories that are told to children when they are small. You will grow up and become a hero one day, is what they are all told. But what's left out of the telling is what makes a person a hero. You become a hero only once your name has been immortalized in stone. The ones left behind will memorize it, even if they're not sure what it was that you did. Dying is heroic enough. That's what they all believe.  
  
"Hmmm.... not always ," Iruka replies, his eyes rising to Kakashi's face, quiet and contemplative. There's the slightest dip of his brows as he studies Kakashi's expression, as he searches his eyes for something. An answer, perhaps, that might explain the tone of that question.  
  
"Not always, hmm?"  
  
"Not _always_. Do you believe in fate?"  
  
Kakashi falls quiet for a moment, gaze shifting away from Iruka and beyond him to the sound of a family's laughter coming from a nearby home. Laughter that might not have been possible if not for a certain young man who holds the sun in his hands and doesn't get burned. "Only when it comes to Naruto."  
  
Iruka laughs softly, rubbing slightly at the back of his head. "That's true..." For a moment he puffs up, proud, shoulders squaring, the smile on his face stretching wide. But there's a slight hesitance that creases his brow, that stops the smile from reaching his eyes, as his gaze lingers a moment too long on Kakashi's face before quickly snapping to the oranges.  
  
"Your oranges look good. Try them with tea sometime, hmm?" The suggestion sounds more of a goodbye, as Iruka raises his hand and turns to go.  
  
"Iruka-san." Kakashi calls after him, palming an orange, and the look that Iruka gives him seems almost hopeful as he quickly turns back -- only to have his eyes widen in surprise when he instinctively raises a hand to catch the orange that Kakashi tosses to him. For a moment, he looks a little stunned, standing there with an orange in his hand and something like a memory flicking before his eyes. It's a nostalgic look that's there as quickly as it's gone, but Kakashi notices it. Wonders about it, a little. What it was that Iruka saw.  
  
"Thank you," Iruka says softly, a smile blooming at the corners of his mouth.  
  
Kakashi returns the smile with an arced eye of his own, then turns, tossing a hand up in the air in a wave as he goes. He feels the intensity of Iruka's eyes on him until he turns the corner.  
  
  


*

A memory.  
  
Or perhaps a dream.  
  
One breath.  
  
Two.  
  
You go very still --  
  
It's devastating, the way sensation rips through you, tearing and driving with relentless fury, knocking you flat and your back is arching, head falling back with your lips in a cry that's silenced by the winds roaring inside of you with it all slamming in -- the wall goes crack , spiderwebs spreading through wood -- hips bucking and thrashing, fingers digging deeper where they clutch and --  
  
 _I don't know if I'll ever really deserve you, but you're everything, everything, everything. Even if I never say the words and don't know how, you can hear it. See it. Feel it, like this. The way I clutch and hold on and never want to let go. I'm dragging you in deeper and pulling you in until you're buried too deep, and can't dig yourself out. Until you're a part of me, grown right in like him, and I guess he belongs to you too, since he's a part of me, and I'm a part of you._  
  
"--Why did you run away?"  
  
His fingers are in your hair and the world is no longer coming apart but falling together. Konoha, below you in the valley, all golden and waiting. And the sun is setting, painting itself in slow strokes across your home, where children laugh through the streets of Tea Avenue. Filling the air with the sound of their small voices. Bells on a line in summer, is what it sounds like. And they go chasing butterflies in the fields where shinobi train their pride, and hone their honor.  
  
The scenery changes and the fields empty themselves out. This is not the Konoha you call home, but the one that you almost destroyed. And the silence is stifling, a heavy thing that fills up the ears like the sound of Madara's voice, all leaden in your mind.  
  
You see yourself, and you see what you had done.  
  
Lightning screaming in your hand and your teacher's blue eyes narrowed and hard.  
  
"I just need some time." You say, and he does not give you a look of disapproval for the lie.  
  
He smiles instead and asks, "Is it helping?"   
  
His fingers are gently moving. Soothing in their rise and fall. Their steady rhythm that knows just how to stroke.  
  
At night the forest closes up. And the stars and the moon disappear beyond the treeline. No light pierces through the veil. It is too muted and soft and the tangle of trees here is so dense, not even sun can cut through the pitch of it.  
  
And you are there, searching.  
  
For an answer, perhaps.  
  
Or maybe the question.  
  
"I'm not sure."  
  
"You should come back." He says it like it's the most natural thing to say. To him, maybe it is.  
  
But he was not there when the barriers fell.  
  
"I don't deserve to be there right now."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I compromised the safety of the village."  
  
His fingers stop, but only for a moment.  
  
They start stroking again a moment later. Root to tip and back again. Sometimes they trace down the side of your face. Like they're trying to memorize you, to keep you in place, so you do not run away.  
  
"You're going to have to be stronger so that it doesn't happen again," he says softly.  
  
"Konoha is safer without me in it." This is what you believe.  
  
"Konoha needs you. _ I _ need you." And then he smiles in the way he always does when you walk in through the door and he is there waiting. "You should come home," he whispers and his fingers are in your hair and his lips are soft when they kiss you and in that moment, you are in the bed you share with him, in the home you built together.  
  
The world disappears and holds you in stasis like this: connected, only with him.  
  
He breathes out.  
  
And you breathe in.  
  
You breathe together like this.  
  
And you feel whole.  
  
"I already am home."  
  
  


*

  
There is a kind of disjointed, confused disembodiment that settles over Kakashi when he opens his eyes and sees above him a white ceiling, and not the heavy arms of a sycamore tree, swaying gently in the autumn breeze. When he realizes he is alone in his bed with a green shuriken print blanket tucked over him, instead of with his back against soft grass, head in a warm lap and gentle fingers stroking through his hair and down his face.   
  
He can almost still feel fingertips there, tender as they caress down his jawline, linger over his chin, pressing against his lips.   
  
They smell like oranges and cinnamon and tea.   
  
A dream, perhaps.   
  
Or a memory.   
  


*

  
  
Kakashi watches him from under a tree, his back pressed to the wood, a book propped open in his hand that he pretends to read.  
  
Across the street, through throngs of pedestrians, Iruka sits laughing at a table outside of a sweets shop. Raidou and Genma have his full attention as they lean across the table, gesturing to emphasize some tale of great adventure that they must be sharing. Iruka throws his head back, eyes crinkling as he laughs in the unreserved way that he sometimes does when he feels everything is right with the world. Or at least, everything is right in that moment. His fingers work deftly as they peel an orange, and Kakashi feels as though this is something he must have seen him do a million times -- even though this is the first time he's actually seen it. Watches as Iruka slices the rind with a thumbnail, then gently, carefully peels the skin away from the flesh. His gestures are slow and patient, unhurried in the revealing.  
  
Kakashi knows the skin will remain almost in one piece.  
  
(How he knows this fact is another thing entirely.)  
  
Iruka finishes peeling the orange and sets the rind aside, almost fully intact.   
  
Kakashi watches as he breaks the orange in half, gently peels off a slice, and takes a bite. He washes it down with a sip of tea, which he has made spicier with a stick of cinnamon.  
  
Kakashi shunshins away just as Iruka's eyes meet his own.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Maybe he hadn't been standing there at all, and it was only Iruka's imagination.  
  
But the next time Iruka does see him, it is raining outside and Kakashi is on his knees, hand, hair and face and clothes stained and dripping with crimson. Those hands are shaking with the effort of pressing guts in to the gaping wound of a man who is long dead with dilated pupils and staring blindly at the ceiling. But every time Kakashi puts it in, it slips back out between his fingers. And with each slip of muscle against small and bony white fingers, comes a strange sound that comes from somewhere in Kakashi's stomach and forces its way out of his throat.  
  
There is nothing -- no amount of training, or lessons, or experience, or words or manuals -- in the world that can prepare Iruka for this. To watch a child deny death and try to fix things that can't be fixed. To watch Kakashi cry and make all those noises that make Iruka feel like had swallowed knives.  
  
Iruka doesn't know how long he stands there, just watching an eight year old boy shove and shove and press and listen to the squelching noise of organic mucus and blood and tissue slide and slip. But he doesn't think when he kneels beside the boy and press hands very slowly to the ones trying to hold organs and blood in its proper place, to stop them from coming out. It feels cold under Iruka's palms, the flesh and blood but not as cold as Kakashi's hands; very, very small hands. He holds those hands to stop its frantic movements. To warm them.  
  
"No, Kakashi…" Iruka says.  
  
And yet he doesn't pull the hands away from the mess. Not yet. Iruka knows Sakumo is dead; he should close his eyes. Let the man rest in peace. But he's not looking at Sakumo, he's looking at Kakashi and Iruka feels so at loss staring at the small and bloody, tear-streaked frightened face.  
  
(How do you explain death to a face like that?)  
  
Iruka's voice is barely above a whisper. "Enough…"  
  
"No."  
  
Kakashi panics, struggles wildly, trying to get his hands out of Iruka's bigger ones.  
  
"I have to, I have to do this, if I don't do this, Father's not going to come back! I have to put it all back!"  
  
"He's gone, Kakashi. Let him go."  
  
This is not how you treat the dead. The dead are meant to close their eyes and be peaceful, leave this world behind. But instead, Iruka lets go of those little hands, lets Kakashi shove and struggle with organs till they're all back in their place. Until Kakashi is pulling down the mask and wiping at his face with the sleeve of his shirt and looking left and right.  
  
They stand in a sea blood where the smell of death hasn't sunk in to the floors and hasn't clung to the air around him, not yet. But the smell of blood fills Iruka's nose, soaks under his finger nails and the soles of his shoes. It's hard to breathe here, and Kakashi's nose is runny from tears that he tries to stop because ninjas who cry break rule number twenty-five. But the tears are just falling and falling …  
  
And Iruka just watches, keeps watching. Then reaches over and closes those unseeing eyes. Sakumo looks like every great hero who has passed on to the other side. He looks like how he should, not the empty-gazed body that Iruka knows will haunt a child's mind.  
  
"Kakashi, it's all right…" Iruka says, kneeling in front of Kakashi and blocking the view of the mess behind, hands on the boy's shoulders, squeezing gently, comfortingly.  
  
He looks at this face is smaller, rounder around the cheekbones, with eyes that are both gray, no scar cutting across one eye, no red eye. Iruka pulls those hands that wipe and try to stop the tears. Kakashi should cry. It's better to cry. Iruka can't take what he sees there, the mess, the seams coming apart, desperation and fear.  
  
He pulls Kakashi against him, wraps arms around him protectively. He's so small like this, so helpless, so breakable. Iruka hides him from the mess around them and from the world and rain that sounds like bodies falling against the ground.  
  
And doesn't let go.

 

*

  
Iruka wakes with a jerk at a clap of thunder outside, and the sound of rainfall sounds like a hushing whisper amongst those who sleep. He straightens immediately from where he had been slumped against his desk, folders and scrolls towering left and right, and remembers that it's a Tuesday. It is his turn to bring dinner over to the crew working the night shift in redefining the land and filling craters left by the war with more fertile greenery and water. Make it habitable, turn a warzone to something beautiful once more.  
  
The dream is pushed, _shoved_ to the back of his mind, the door locked, the key thrown away. Better to not think about it. Better to forget.  
  
He collects stacks and stacks of pre-ordered bento and cups of soup, and arrives at the temporary site shelter where shinobi responsible for the new sector are just piling in. Iruka won't ask himself questions about what he saw or why. He has more important things to worry about, like joining the second half of the shift, where he hands everyone their bento box and soup.  
  
He hands Kakashi's his, looks up at him and smiles, greets him the same way he does with everyone else. "Hello, Kakashi-san. Sorry to keep you waiting! Here!"  
  
(It's easier to smile, to pretend he hadn't seen what he saw. Doesn't know what he knows.)  
  
Iruka's gaze lingers too long on Kakashi's face. Remembers a smaller and rounder one, struggling to stop tears that left wet grooves upon blood stained cheeks.  
  
Kakashi inhales lightly, audibly, an eyebrow rising. He can tell what the soup is without opening the lid. "Eggplant miso?"  
  
There is surprise in Kakashi's tone as he looks down with something like appreciation in his eye at the steam-blotched clear lid of the bento box -- salted mackerel, rice and pickled vegetables.  
  
Iruka abruptly remembers, with stark clarity, the curve of an unguarded smile and a pleased hum murmuring at the back of a throat, as slender fingers lifted a porcelain bowl to lips; suddenly sees mismatched eyes, with a scar running through one lid, closing in appreciation. The memory of mornings, when the weight of a kitchen knife rested in his hand, as eggplant was sliced into thin julienne strips, the miso sitting nearby, in wait. The feel of strong, muscled arms around his middle and a warm mouth mumbling words against the back of his neck, that made Iruka smile and brush past the collar of a striped yukata. Iruka remembers these things, sees them like he sees Kakashi sitting there before him now.  
  
Yet where these memories come from, he isn't sure.  
  
From a dream, perhaps. So really, they can't be memories at all.  
  
But even that realization doesn't stop what comes out of Iruka's mouth. "It's your favorite," he says, his answer punctuated with a smile that quickly falters and falls when he realizes what he had just blurted out, the words rolling off his tongue like he'd known all along.  
  
A secret he doesn't and shouldn't know.  
  
Like how he shouldn't know what Kakashi looked like when he was a small boy, and how he struggled to push back his father's insides to their proper place.  
  
Maybe it was a story he had heard long ago, and somewhere it buried itself into the ground of his subconscious only to emerge when he closed his eyes.  
  
Kakashi's eye snaps up to him, a flash of surprise flickering in a grey iris, before the corner of his eye softens to something amused, the shadows that form his mouth curling up underneath the mask like rising smoke. "Have you been stalking me, Iruka-san?" The question is drawled. Lazy. Almost knowing, with the way Kakashi looks at him, as though they are conspirators in some great secret.  
  
Maybe they are. Maybe at night, Kakashi walks through Iruka's dreams in the memory-shape of a young boy with hands covered in his father's blood; or at times, visits him when he sleeps and lies down in his lap, so Iruka can thread his fingers through coarse hair and look down upon a face whose contours he could only ever guess at when he's awake, but never know. It is said that Hatake Kakashi has never shown his face to anyone, and certainly not to Iruka. But maybe. Just maybe. By some stroke of strange luck or secret jutsu or unseen thread, maybe they're connected somehow. Maybe fate is trying to tell them something, tell him something, things about Kakashi he shouldn't know. Things about Kakashi that might be complete fantasy or the impossible truth.  
  
The thought of this absurd impossibility, conflated with Kakashi's question, makes Iruka's cheeks flush red and his gaze shift, eyes sliding away as he picks up his own bento. "What an outlandish claim! Don't flatter yourself, Kakashi-san. I heard it from a colleague." He hastily excuses himself to leave, hoping that his answer will be enough to dispel the moment of awkwardness. The breach of what he's certain is privacy.  
  
He knows Kakashi doesn't believe him, with the way his eyes follow Iruka as he walks away.  
  
Didn't Kakashi always call him a terrible liar?  


*

  
"You're a terrible liar," he hisses out between his teeth, as he presses Iruka against the wall, liking the small gasp that sounds almost a whimper when shoulder blades thud against the wall.  
  
Iruka has been telling him all day that he wasn't in the mood, all the while casting him furtive looks and glances, heated moments of want and need and desire when he thought Kakashi wasn't looking. It's all some kind of a game to Iruka, and it always is between them. It's how they keep things alive and exciting, because if everything were unpredictable, the wanting would cease and there would be nothing more to discover about the other.  
  
There is always something to discover, some kind of new way one of them might gasp when fingers slide in just so, or the way an expression slices in half, opens itself up, when a spine arches just before that hot white moment when everything spins to a halt because your heart feels like it's coming out of your chest. Some new way to crush your teeth into skin, a new scar to trace. Take away vision with a blindfold and fumble with a body and figure out how to make it fit like it always does, against the other. Inside the other. Memorize his scent or trace the line of his body -- the curve of his shoulder, the straight angle of his hip, sloping towards you. The way his pelvis cuts just so. The heat of his cock when it rises in your hand. The way his breath hitches just before he comes.  
  
This thing between them has always been new. It never gets old. It never can.  
  
And this is just one more way of keeping the thrill in it, when Iruka lies between his teeth and says not now when his eyes say yes. When his body does too. When his fingers curl around Kakashi's vest, splay against his chest as though to push him away, but then viciously grips the fabric and pulls him close. And it's Iruka who crushes their mouths together, who shifts his hips so Kakashi can feel what presses up, hard and hungry, against his thigh.  
  
Kakashi wonders for a moment if Iruka had been walking around all day with that. Thinks it can't be possible, because he would have smelled it. That thick, musky scent of arousal. Of Iruka. Seeping right through his pants.  
  
This must be from getting caught then, from Kakashi figuring it out, the truth to this little game.  
  
That the one he had been denying hadn't been Kakashi, but himself.  
  
This moment, like most, is not about Kakashi, because it never is. Moments belong to those who know what it means to live. They don't belong to Kakashi, even the moments that have him gasping with his hand in Iruka's hair and Iruka's mouth wrapped around his cock. Iruka's eyes are dark and hungry with lust as they watch Kakashi, as his plunging hot mouth and stroking fingers, slick with spit and precome, wrest that tight wire Kakashi always holds around himself right out of his grip. Pulls it away viciously in a way only Iruka can. He holds it to himself, away from Kakashi, watching him come undone. Hearing the way those sounds which Kakashi always swallows for everyone else, come spilling right out of his mouth, for Iruka.  
  
Kakashi thinks he sees Iruka smile around his cock just before--  
  
  
  
\-- he wakes with a gasp, heart thundering, slamming against the inside of his chest -- pulse so loud, he can hear it in his ears, even above the rush of breath that has his head spinning with dizziness and need and so much want he hasn't felt since before the war. Before the village crumbled under the weight of Pain's hand, and Kakashi along with it. Before Sasuke and Madara and a hundred thousand clay soldiers with Tenzou's face. Before the beginning of the end that Kakashi can't even start to think of because all he can feel is the heat inside his body which swirls vicious and hot and fast at the pit of his stomach, clawing for release as it throbs through him.  
  
It is swift and hungry and relentless with the way it rips through him, jerks at him until he can't ignore it anymore. Can't pretend like he still has enough sleep in him to make it go away on its own.  
  
He can feel his cock, hard and heavy and thick, pressing uncomfortably against the thin fabric of his pants, straining against the barrier that holds it down, the fabric of his mask humid and uncomfortable as he groans. If he closes his eyes again, he can almost feel Iruka's hot, wet mouth wrapped around the head of his cock, making all sorts of obscenely lewd and sexy little noises as he hums contently around Kakashi, tongue swirling in a way that makes Kakashi think he might just come right there and then if Iruka didn't have his fingers gripping the base of his cock and another hand around his balls.  
  
He knows exactly how to suck him, how to make him forget there is a world outside of this moment, outside of the two of them with Iruka on his knees and Kakashi's cock down his throat and a little smile on his lips like this is what he's always been waiting for, and Kakashi's breath comes out of his nostrils in hot puffs, a hoarse moan rising in his throat as he wraps a hand around his cock and pulls it out of his pants and _strokes_ , feeling the warm slickness of precome dripping from the swollen head. This is the way Iruka likes him most, when he's so turned on, so needy, it doesn't take much to break him down, for him to lose that control Iruka hates to see when he tucks his face behind a mask or an expression that wipes the truth Iruka witnesses when Kakashi is hungry and open and desperate like this.  
  
And it works every time like a charm, when Iruka laps his tongue against the head, rubs the dripping tip against his swollen lips. Smears it down his chin. Makes a mess of it, but he loves it when it's a mess, because the mess is Kakashi, and there isn't a part of Kakashi he doesn't love, that doesn't belong to him. Even the parts that are broken and fucked up and scarred beyond any hope of healing.  
  
Iruka will wrap his arms around it anyway, the way he wraps his arms around Kakashi and tells him he'll never let go.  
  
Under the sycamore tree, he whispers promises to him Kakashi doesn't believe, because he loses everyone eventually, and it's the loss Kakashi is preparing himself for even as Iruka swears to him he'll never go.  
  
One day, when Iruka has Kakashi up against that tree and he's on his knees and making a mess like he always does, he presses the palm of his hand against Kakashi's stomach and feels the rush of his pulse through the artery there under his skin. He holds Kakashi's heart in one hand and his cock in the other. And that's when he says, "You're beautiful," in the middle of all that mess, dripping down his chin.  
  
Kakashi's mess drips down the side of his palm as his fingers stroke faster, his breath goes quicker, and all he can hear is the salacious squelches of the way his fist works his cock and the sound of his thudding heart and the way he gasps and Iruka's voice as it echoes through his mind. Behind closed eyes, he sees Iruka there on his knees smiling and watching him, waiting, as the heat inside Kakashi grows and grows; as he feels that thing inside release in a sudden snap that has him bucking his hips and holding his breath just before he goes very still -- and he sees himself fucking Iruka and then he sees Iruka fucking him and it suddenly doesn't matter who's doing the fucking or being fucked because all Kakashi knows and can feel is the heat of his body exploding over his fist.

  
It's the strongest orgasm that he's had in years.  
  
Later, as Kakashi lies with his come drying on his stomach, he stares up at the ceiling in a state of quiet shock, realizing that he's forgetting where dreaming ends and where reality begins.

 


End file.
